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Microsoft’s 365 workplace software and Outlook email delivery began recovering across Europe and North America on Friday as the company expanded server fixes from Asia Pacific, though it cautioned that users may still encounter intermittent disruptions. As the outage stretched into a second day, European stock exchange operator Euronext instructed listed companies to communicate corporate disclosures by phone, while market traders turned to WhatsApp and fax machines to execute deals.
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In the UK, the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency reported difficulty sending and receiving emails, the Planning Inspectorate paused its appeals management service, and the National Cyber Security Centre warned the public to guard against opportunistic phishing calls and messages. A British union leader also warned that the outage was having a “serious impact” on the National Health Service, leaving emergency call handlers “unable to refer patient details in the normal way” after the health system earlier rescheduled some procedures.
The breakdown began Thursday at 16:17 UTC on Exchange Online when a group of servers unexpectedly went offline and overwhelmed a core process on remaining infrastructure, driving problem reports on Downdetector to 74 countries and territories and a peak of 19,650 reports a minute across five Microsoft services. Microsoft ruled out a cyberattack, paused deployments and extended its email timeout window to 48 hours to protect queued messages as engineers worked to keep restored servers from freezing again under returning traffic.
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From todayMicrosoft 365 Services Begin Recovering in Europe and North America After Global Outage
Microsoft’s traffic rerouting and server-side fixes hold across Europe and North America, with only small pockets of errors remaining. This is the most likely outcome because the current headline already indicates recovery in the largest enterprise regions.
The recovery proves uneven, with recurring authentication, routing or capacity problems affecting enterprise users after the initial improvement. This would keep the outage in customer and investor focus, but still remains primarily a Microsoft-specific operational event.
Even if service availability returns, the outage duration leads customers to seek service-level credits and public explanations. The financial impact would likely be limited, but reputational pressure could weigh modestly on Microsoft’s stock.
Investigators look beyond routine server failures to determine whether authentication, network configuration or external interference contributed to the outage. This is less likely based on the reported server and routing fixes, but it would create the sharpest near-term downside for Microsoft.
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